Page 11 - Game testing #2

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter (GRAW)

In Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon 3, players will embody Captain Scott Mitchell as he commands the Ghosts and Special Forces allies, equipped with the IWS in the quest to save the president of the United States, recover stolen nuclear codes, and eliminate a vicious band of renegade soldiers hell-bent on unleashing catastrophe. The game unfolds entirely in Mexico City, where numerous, thoroughly researched, and detailed environments will deliver complete immersion into the future of urban warfare.

Don't mistake the PC version for being a port of the Xbox 360 game. The PC version has larger and different levels than those featured on the Xbox 360, as well as a different graphics engine and style of gameplay. The game itself looks great, and the intricate physics modeling seen in the single-player version is still active in the multiplayer version. In fact, it's so detailed that if you have the upcoming Aegia physics card, you'll see sparks bouncing off objects in the environment. Even if you don't have a physics card, though, there are all sorts of other interactions you'll encounter in multiplayer. For instance, aluminum cans litter the street and stepping on them not only kicks them around, but also creates a loud sound, which may betray your presence to the enemy.

You need to have a monster of a graphics card because this baby can be hard on current graphics cards, even high-end ones. So we are playing the level Coup d' Etat (Checkpoint 2) here (fantastic level). Configuration wise we enable (as always) all eye-candy. We have 16xAF enabled, and furthermore all settings set to high.

There's no GPU limitation ... 10x7, and disaster strikes the Phenom. It has a really hard time fighting the Core processors.

Half-Life 2 - Episode One

We disabled AA in the game also. Let's have a peek.

Episode 1 is configured at the best possible settings, everything is maxed out and enabled yet we left AA disabled as we did not want the graphics card to become a bottleneck.

We scale in resolutions from 1024x768 towards 1600x1200 and phew ... that isn't good at all. The HL2 is very susceptive to changes in memory and CPU.

Crysis - Single Player Demo

Let's spice it up a little. With mankind facing an alien cataclysm, your elite Delta force and North Korean forces combine, united by common humanity, in a battle to save Earth. Graphically stunning, tactically challenging, and always intensely immersive, Crysis sets player choice at the heart of its gameplay, with customizable tactical weaponry and adaptable armor allowing instant response to changing conditions. Judging from the downloadable demo, Crysis doesn't feel all that different from its predecessor, Far Cry. Both are set on an island. Both involve a latent (here in the demo, only briefly glimpsed) alien menace. Both bid you move more or less linearly through shaggy jungle areas, where the fact that you're progressing in a single direction is camouflaged by your ability to approach obstacles in your path any way you like. Think the "every time you play a situation yields radically different behaviors and results" approach in games like Rainbow Six Vegas or Gears of War, except on more of a geographic scale.

Crysis is one of the first games out there which is multi-threaded and thus takes advantage of multiple cores inside a CPU. Above you can see the behavior mid-game. It's still a beginning though as the chart definitely shows that Crysis is more lenient towards processors with two cores or more.

Have a peek:

Once we go in-game and measure the performance we see the graphics card becoming the bottleneck. Only at 10x7 you can notice a difference. The Phenom 9700 is getting close, but is not as fast as the Q6600. The more the GPU becomes a bottlenck, the less important the CPU will be. It's a symbiosis between the two.